Panasonic Lumix GH1: First Impressions + English Manual

Sunday, 10 May 2009, 10:15 am by Dan Carew

A friend of a friend brought my svelte new Panny GH1 back from Tokyo last Monday. But I had such a crazy week I didn’t have much time to play ’til this weekend. It’s well-built and wonderfully small. Here’s mine with the included 14-140mm lens, next to a U.S. $10 bill and a Hong Kong $2 coin.

I’d been struggling through the Japanese manual (with 7-grade Japanese reading abililty and my dictionary). But then realized this little camera is packed with a dizzying array of nifty and complicated auto AND manual features. And lots of new concepts (like face recogniztion of individual people + a whole matrix of options for focusing: manual focusing, assisted focusing and auto-focusing, etc.)

So I realized I really needed to get an English manual, which I did, and now post here for you. So here is the English pdf manual for the 24p North America version of the Panasonic Lumix GH1.

I took some quick videos, to see how easy it was to get into true 24p and edit in FinalCut Pro at 1920×1080. Here are my quick learnings so far:

The AVCHD video files are a real pain to work with.
While the GH1′s sensor (which is almost as big as the Red One sensor) captures 24p, a pull-down (or push-up?) is added, to make a 29.97 interlaced file.
Do NOT copy the file directories off your SD card or manipulate them in any way. This messes things up. (The video files plus other essential meta-data files in nested folers are all in a folder called PRIVATE)
Easiest way I’ve found to process the files and get them to my target of 1920×1080 ProRes422 HQ for editing in FCP is

Open FCP and “Log and Transfer”.
Insert your GH1 SD card in a card reader.
“Log and Transfer” will recognize the files.
Pull them into FinalCut (i.e. transcode) them, to 1920×1080 ProRes422 HQ.
Don’t edit with these. They’re nasty interlaced files.
Take these files and de-interlace them in Apple Compressor. Very important: use “Frame Control” -> “Deinterlace” -> “Reverse Telecine”. Do NOT use any of the other settings under “Deinterlace” (e.g., “Fast”, “Better”, or “Best”) as you will be degrading your movie image.

This is just my quick and dirty guess in an hour of a workflow that seemed to work. Happy to hear from others on better (and quicker!) options. Don’t have any footage worth posting yet. Maybe soon.

For now, however, here are some very rough and dirty stills from my GH1 using the out-of the box 14-140mm lens, shot mostly just in Ai mode, out my office window (out-of-camera unmanipulated .jpgs):

Images will look a lot better once I actually read the manual, use a tripod (these were all shot handheld), shoot in RAW, etc. etc. So I’m duly impressed enough to bite the bullet and buy the Panasonic Leica D Summilux 25mm F1.4 ASPH, a Four Thirds lens that needs an adaptor to go onto the GH1′s Micro Four Thirds mount. Then, we’re making movies, with shallow depth of field and all…

Posted in 24P, AVCHD, Final Cut, GH-1, Hong Kong, Indie filmmaking, Red Camera, cameras, how-to, lenses | 3 Comments

3 Responses

on Monday, 9 November 2009, 9:41 pm at 9:41 pm | Reply Tom Greiner

Hello Dan!

Greetings to Oversea!

We are a small german Indie-production, doing imagefilms, music videos and documentaries. We are fed up with the “normal” HD video systems and standards and waiting for the RED Scarlet, that fits our budget. But as you know its not out now. So for the time between, we want to buy a Video DSLR. The 5D is cool, but we don’t want to spend so much money til the REDs are available. So, two cams are in focus of our interest (and “between”- budget): the Pana GH1 and the Canon 7D.
To make a long story short: what would your reference/referral (don’t know if its the right word for that)!?
Many features of the GH1 are cam-like and good for working like we know it. Also the wide range of lenses, also for a later use with a RED. Otherwise…the codec! Is it really so worse?
The Canon 7D has a bigger sensor (not our argument at all), maybe a little bit more DOF, but is more expensive, not all lenses useable, but more framerates and the better codec.

I own also a Qlympus E-330, same sensor and system like the GH1, so I could use my fine lenses with an 4/3 to Micro 4/3 adapter. Could it be an advantage?

It would be really nice to get a tip who to come out of this decision jungle!

Many greetings from rainy Germany,

Tom

P.S.: Sorry for my bad English
P.S.2: Nice view out of your office. I am a little bit envious (right word?)!
on Tuesday, 10 November 2009, 7:37 am at 7:37 am | Reply Dan Carew

Hi Tom,

Thanks for your comments and questions!

In a nutshell: Right now I would have to recommend the 7D over the GH1. The GH1 just has too much compression artifacts with any movement, especially of things with detail (leaves, water, clothing, etc.) Fast pans look like horrible muddy blurs.

And it’s also pretty hard to focus the GH1. Example: I was filming my friends jazz concert in a nightclub over the weekend. With my Leica 1.4 25mm lens, I had plenty of light. But, because I had to focus manually, most of the footage was unusably soft. You just can’t tell when you’re in focus (unless you’re doing a locked off tripod shot, where you checked focus carefully before the shot, using the punch-in zoom). Using the 14-140mm lens that comes with the camera (which does autofocus) there was less light, but the images were still barely useable. However, the autofocus was not very good: even if I was pointed constantly at the singers face, the focus seemed to drift and scan.

While I have not personally played with the 7D for comparison, I know a few people who have just received it (one who will use it in his corporate video business) and they like it a lot. Once I do get a chance to play with it. I’ll put some comments up here. (I suppose I should also put up a post with my verdict on the GH1…)

Good luck with your decision and filmmaking!
on Wednesday, 10 February 2010, 9:56 am at 9:56 am | Reply UnGatoNipón

Thanks a lot for the manual, found your post looking for it.

In my experience, the focus issue can be solved just learning how to help the camera to do so; At least using a 20mm pancake autofocus lenses, I could shoot video at concerts with totally focused and steady video; What I mean by ‘how to help the camera’ is to close the aperture so the depth of field increases and then the camera finds it easier to find contrast areas to focus in. If the aperture is set wide open (quite natural in a dark place) then it’s quite easy to loose focus and have the camera looking for it but closing it a bit the GH1 is still capable to get quite a lot of light of it… again, with a 20mm 1.7 panasonic pancake set.

This is my experience at least. I was surprised to find out you also use Compressor to de-interlace the video – I just used the log and transfer option and edited with that directly, without quality issues (at least for me ) You can check it out in this video, many scenes were shot with a GH 1 / 14-140 – 20 pancake.